Meatloaf in Manhattan by Robert Power Page A

the remaining bluecoats fight to the death. Those are the brave ones. Others take their own lives, driven mad by the brutality of battle, terrified by tales of torture indescribable awaiting those who live. Little-Path spots one white man who stands out from the others. He wears a greatcoat and top hat, sitting on a rock above a ravine, partly hidden by a bush.
    â€˜Your chance,’ says Hollow-Moon, who appears at Little-Path’s shoulder, pointing to the man. ‘Earn an eagle feather, little brave,’ he whispers; blood, war-paint, dust and sweat cracking into a smile of encouragement.
    With the noise and the cries, the whimpers, the screams and the snorting and neighing of the horses, the cutting of flesh, the whizz and crackle of bullets, the grunts and screams, the howls and sighs and all the peculiar madness of battle, Little-Path crawls on hands and knees up to the ridge behind the man in the great-coat. Marcus Kellogg is frantically writing in a small bound book. Little-Path creeps forward, drifting over the ground, soundless, effortless. He gets so close he can see the beads of sweat running down the back of the white man’s neck. Little-Path, almost in slow motion, extends his arm, and, with his fingertip, touches the man on the hand that holds the pen. The man turns around, not in fear, not in shock, more in resigned expectation. Little-Path sees he has no gun. Their eyes meet. The man says something that means nothing to the brave.
    â€˜We can’t take the clouds,’ he says, over and again, looking up to the sky.
    Then Marcus Henry Kellogg turns and looks at the slip of a boy standing before him. ‘I’ll die today,’ he says, ‘but yours will be the greater death.’
    Little-Path throws back his head and howls. Down below Hollow-Moon whistles. His braves, brandishing tomahawks, arrows and stone clubs, spring up from the grasses and charge the ravine for the final assault, to avenge the silencing of the buffalo, to claim back something of their own, to make their last stand.
    Marcus Kellogg will write no more, nor speak. ‘Clouds’ is the last word he pens as the arrow whispers through the air, its sharp and glittering point slicing into his neck. He gasps, he sighs; he stares straight into the young eyes of Little-Path. Something about this singular death, this killing, this man in a greatcoat on a ridge above the fray, this end, hits hard at Little-Path. He is shocked at the intensity of his feelings. So sure until now of his place, his purpose.
    As the arrow takes the breath from the man in the greatcoat, when he slumps in his death-throes, Little-Path sits down on the ledge, numbed by something he has yet to understand. Then, when the braves have done and finished below, stripped the corpses bare of clothes and rings and hair and teeth, one comes up to the ridge and with a bloodied knife hacks at Marcus Kellogg’s head, wrenching scalp and skin. Little-Path knows he wants his feather, but what else he wants, what else he knows, what he might become, that was once so simply set, is lost to him in that moment.
    Later that night the deeds of battle are recounted: the daring raids, the reckless attacks. Little-Path is remembered and honoured in the counting coup.
    â€˜I saw Little-Path,’ says Reindeer-Stalking, ‘high on the ridge before the greatcoat was killed. Our young brave crept upon him and touched him on the hand. So close was he, so daring a deed.’
    All the braves whoop and clap, the fire dances to their cheers and Little-Path is handed the prized feather from the golden eagle.
    The sound of a train’s whistle brings Little-Path back from his daydreaming. He folds the letter Eileen Kellogg had dictated to her pastor and places it in the bag. He looks up, and there in front of him, as if a ghost from the Battle of Greasy Grass, stands an older man. A Sioux or a Cheyenne. Difficult to tell from the bloated face, the matted hair and